Still have thousands of photos waiting to go on the website! I am still working late in to the night and getting up early to get as much time to go through the photos. My email is mostly on hold, and I only check in to social networks sparingly to link to new blog posts from here. This is all because I want to get these photos onto the proofing site as soon as possible. Why does it take so long? The reason is I want the images to look as good as they can before they are released for viewing.
Baltimore Dancesport Challenge
Images that are out of focus and immediately deleted. For ballroom dance and other events, any photos where the hands or other objects are obscuring the main subject are also removed. All of our cameras are set to shoot RAW files. This is a less-refined version of the JPG files that are more common. Shooting in RAW allows us to recover more detail from photos where the flashes did not pop, or to adjust the exposure in post.
In setting up the lights for competitive heats, we keep the flashes behind the photographers so they will light the faces of dancers as they pass in front. With ballroom dance floors being very large, there is a gradation of how far the flash will go. If dancers are closer to the photographers, they will be brighter than dancers that are farther away. Shooting in RAW means that there is a lot more data in each file that can be recovered. So to compensate for these differences, I can adjust the Exposure, Highlights or Shadow sliders in Adobe Lightroom to make the photos look similar to each other.
USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships
With the change in the amount of flash, there can also be changes in the color temperature of the photos. We set the cameras to be balanced to the color of the flashes. However if they do not fire, the photos take a very warm, yellow/orange color. This can also be easily adjusted with the White Balance slider. You do not have as much leeway when using JPG files. So again, the RAW files are necessary for this kind of shoot. It does take lot of space on the hard drives, and it takes a lot of time to make the corrections, but I think it’s worth it!
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